Naval lawyer guilty of spilling captives' names

[Freddie Stubbs]

Source: Miami Herald

NORFOLK, Va. -- A military jury Thursday convicted Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz of spilling national security secrets in 2005 when he mailed a list of Guantánamo detainees to a New York City human rights group inside a Valentine's Day card.

It took a seven-member jury of naval officers Diaz's rank or higher three hours to return four guilty findings in the national security court-martial.

At most, conviction will carry 14 years. The jury cleared Diaz of a single charge, punishable by 10 years in prison, of knowing that he would endanger national security when he hit a print button at the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba to produce the list in January 2005.

Diaz, 41, was deputy director of the detention center's legal office at the time. The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights was filing unlawful-detention lawsuits against the Bush administration, and seeking a list of all detainees. The Pentagon refused and it would be more than a year before the names became public in a freedom of information lawsuit.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/466/story/110354.html

[Spinzonner]

1. Under the UCMJ

He isn't obligated to follow illegal orders.

And since the program in question was in violation of the Geneva Conventions - all ratified by the US - they are the law of the land, according to the Constitution.

So he had no obligation to follow regulations or orders that were unconstitutional and, arguably - had an obligation to disobey to uphold the Conventions.

[Shipwack]

2. Agreed, but...

Surely you don't expect a jury of his peers, fellow officers who are hungry for a promotion, to allow him to get away with doing the right thing? It sets a precedent and makes them all look bad.

:eyes:

[Bucky]

3. So does the verdict.

What he guy did was civil disobedience--a protest against immoral authority. And integral part of civil disobedient protest is getting convicted and jailed for defying an unjust law. The whole point, as Martin Luther King would have told you, is to show how morally bankrupt the system is.

[Shipwack]

17. All true, but...

I doubt that the officers on the board convicted him because they wanted to help him in his act of civil disobedience. They voted him guilty because they were corrupt moral cowards (or moral midgets) who wanted to make an example out of him... and ensure they got gold stars next to their names for being "team players".

[Freddie Stubbs]

6. Apperently the human rights group he gave the list to didn't think what he was doing was legal

Otherwise they would not have turned the list over to a federal court.

[The Stranger]

7. Is appeal to the civilian courts? Or to some other military kangaroo court?

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. I can't tell if the military are claiming the names themselves are 'national security secrets'

or just the codes associated with them:

His attorney, Patrick McLain of Dallas, said his client had believed during his six-month tour at the Navy base in Cuba that a then-recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, Rasul v. Bush, meant that civil liberties lawyers were entitled to detainee names in order to sue on their behalf.

''It's really Matt's patriotism more than anything that drove this. He believed in the U.S. Constitution. He believed in everything he learned in law school,'' said McLain, a retired Marine major and former military judge.

''It's not that he thinks the detainees to a man are deserving of release,'' he said. Just that lawyers were entitled to learn their names in order to represent them.

Diaz did not, however, know that a code associated with each name would be considered classified as ''Secret,'' because, according to testimony at the trial, the series of numbers and letters with each name indicated interrogators' and analysts' ''sources and methods'' used by the detention center's intelligence unit.

So was he found guilty of this unwitting disclosure of "interrogators' and analysts' ''sources and methods''" (hmm, I'd like to know interrogation methods, regardless), or did they end up saying the names themselves were secret? If so, it's outrageous they'd even claim that. Common sense and common decency say that the names of detainees have to be known, for anything approaching justice to start. The way the Center for Constitutional Rights acted (handing the list to the FBI) seems to show they thought getting the names that way was illegal. Couldn't they have copied the names, destroyed the original (surely they wouldn't have known what the codes meant), and then tried to get some justice?

[Freddie Stubbs]

8. If he thought what he was doing was legal, why did he do it anonymously?

:shrug:

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. Could have been frightened of non-legal reprisals

Harassment, loss of promotion, etc.

[melm00se]

14. and in a Valentine's Day card?

[The Stranger]

15. What he did cannot be illegal -- that others would attempt to proscribe it was the reason for

secreting it. But revealing information of a crime cannot itself be a crime. That doesn't make sense.

[annabanana]

5. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz is an American Hero.

He did his duty as an American and as a military man, upholding the tenants of the Constitution.

[daleo]

9. Guilty of revealing the identity of people in U.S. government prisons

Imagine what the framers of the U.S. constitution would think of a law like that.

[saigon68]

10. The US Military and its generals are War Criminals

[Freddie Stubbs]

13. How many have been convicted?

:shrug:

[crikkett]

11. I wonder if military officers can be pardoned

by a future president?

Pelosi '07!!

[Up2Late]

16. More news from Bizarro World. In the America I once knew, he would have been given a medal for this.

But in Bush's Bizarro World, the Presidential Medal of Freedom is reserved for War Criminals and complete F*ck-ups.:mad:

[richards1052]

18. Matthew Diaz: American Hero

Please read this devastating interview with him in the http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/051807dnproguantanamo.7b28e8e1.html">Dallas Morning News.

I've also http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2007/05/18/lt-cmdr-matthew-diaz-american-hero/">blogged about the story myself. Diaz deserves a medal instead of 6 months in the brig. Leahy should ask him to testify before the Judiciary Committee & put the Lindsay Grahams of the Senate to shame as someone who really understands the importance of the Geneva Conventions & habeus corpus.

[lovuian]

19. At least he can sleep with a concious

and there will be many who will have to answer for their kissing butt decisions

This is the kinda of stuff that detroys nations

[struggle4progress]

20. Navy lawyer sentenced in Gitmo espionage

NORFOLK, VA. — A Navy lawyer so disillusioned with the government's handling of foreign detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, that he sent classified information about 550 men in custody there to a civilian attorney was sentenced Friday to six months in prison and dismissed from the service.

Lt. Cmdr. Matthew Diaz was convicted Thursday on four of five charges stemming from his actions in early January 2005, while stationed at Guantanamo.

The most serious conviction — violating the Espionage Act by sending classified information to someone not entitled to receive it — carried the possibility of a 10-year sentence.

The four charges carried a maximum 14-year sentence. He began his sentence in the brig Friday night.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/politics/4817799.html
via http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2007/05/former-guantanamo-military-lawyer_19.php